Many conventional contact centers employ statistics engines to compile, publish and archive statistics. Statistics are based on the collection of data and on the aggregation and manipulation of such data. In a conventional contact center the basic building blocks of data are events which arise during the operation of the contact center.
Entities such as exchanges, call servers, automated call handling applications, queue managers and agent stations (for example) participate in these events. Examples of such events might include the arrival of a new call (contact) at the exchange, its transfer through automated call handling routines, its positioning in a queue, its allocation to an agent and the eventual termination of the contact. Each such event is generally notified to the statistics engine by the relevant entity and the statistics engine can determine from the totality of the events the wait time of the call, the movement of the call through an individual queue, the time spent by a given agent in dealing with the call, and so on. By aggregating such data for all of the contacts arriving at the contact center in a given period of time, the statistics engine can derive the average call wait time, the relative activity of each queue, the average time spent on a call by each agent and so on.
Such statistics, when calculated by the statistics engine can include both instantaneous and historical statistics (e.g. both current wait time and longest wait time in previous 24 hours). The statistics are usually published selectively in real time for supervisors to use in monitoring and managing the call center, as well as being published to a database for recordal and reporting purposes in the future.
This conventional approach to the collection and calculation of statistics suffers from the fact that it involves proprietary protocols and routines and there is no uniformity between various products. It is also somewhat limited by the fact that it is extremely centralised and the functionality is entirely determined by the operation of the statistics engine.